Mount Pleasant Road Didn't Wait for the Regent Theatre to Reopen

Walk Mount Pleasant Road this week and you'll pass two kinds of evidence about what this street actually is. On one side, crews are setting up for Saturday's Harvest Fair, the Mount Pleasant Village BIA's annual fall street festival that returns for its 13th year this Saturday, running 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. between Davisville and Eglinton. On the other, the marquee outside 551 Mount Pleasant still reads dark. The Regent Theatre has been closed for six years, and the redevelopment meant to bring it back has spent most of that time in front of committees and tribunals rather than contractors.

It's tempting to treat the Regent's fate as the referendum on whether this stretch of the neighbourhood is thriving or stalling. The street has already answered that question without it.

A fair that predates the closure by six years

The Harvest Fair has been part of the Mount Pleasant Village BIA's calendar since around 2014, which puts this Saturday's event well past a decade running and six years ahead of when the Regent went dark. The BIA itself dates back further still. It formed in 2008 to organize the roughly 200 shops and services strung along Mount Pleasant Road between Davisville and Eglinton, and the fair is one of several recurring events, alongside things like a comedy night held with the Briton House retirement home and the Granite Brewery, that the BIA runs to keep foot traffic moving through the district year-round.

None of that calendar depends on what happens at 551 Mount Pleasant. The fair ran through the theatre's closure in 2020. It's running again this year while the redevelopment sits stuck in the same place it's been for months.

What's actually new on the strip since last year

The retail and hospitality turnover on Mount Pleasant Road and the surrounding blocks has kept moving too. Second Story, an upstairs cocktail bar on the second floor at 1954 Yonge Street, opened this year in the room above street level, adding a new late-evening option to a stretch that's historically closed early.

A few blocks south, a more personal kind of return is underway. The team behind Kramer's, a bar that closed after years as a neighbourhood fixture, found a new home in the old Fionn MacCool's space at 1867 Yonge Street. As the team told BlogTO earlier this year, "That neighbourhood meant a lot to us and still does." The plan wasn't one restaurant but three:

• Cucina, which opened this past winter to what the team called a better reception than they'd hoped for, despite launching during what's typically a slow season for new Toronto restaurants
• The Eatery, a modern Italian bar food concept the team aimed to have open in time for this past summer's World Cup
• A rotisserie concept, which was still mid-renovation as of this past March

That's three new addresses opening inside a single storefront that used to be one closed bar, on a street that also just added a cocktail lounge nobody was expecting. None of that activity was contingent on the Regent reopening either.

The one project that hasn't moved

The Regent's story is worth knowing in full, because the neighbourhood has been following it closely for years and the details explain why the theatre is still dark.

The plan, designed by NORR Architects alongside Hariri Pontarini Architects, the firm behind the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford, would rebuild the auditorium as a three-story, 600-seat live venue with two balconies and movable seating. A neighbourhood group, the Mt. Pleasant Village Revival Residents Association, opposed the scale of the project and the traffic it would bring to a residential side street, and that opposition is what sent the file to the Ontario Land Tribunal in the first place. The tribunal ultimately sided with the developers. Even with that ruling in hand, the project had not moved past the proposal stage as of April 2026, according to Wikipedia's account of the case, meaning years of hearings ended with an approval and still no visible construction.

Whatever you think about the outcome, the pattern is clear: this is one specific building tied up in a specific land use dispute, not a barometer for the block it sits on.

The murals kept going up anyway

The BIA's public art investments haven't waited on the theatre either. The "37 Poles, 37 Artists" project wrapped dozens of the street's lamp posts in hand-painted murals as part of the city-wide "I Heart Main Street" initiative. At Manor Road and Mount Pleasant, street artist Bacon painted two large floral murals that have become one of the more photographed corners on the strip. Both projects are the kind of small, cumulative investment a business district makes when it's confident people will keep walking past to see them.

What this actually tells you about the street

If you live near Mount Pleasant Road, the useful takeaway isn't "the Regent will reopen eventually" or "the Regent is doomed." Neither claim is settled, and the tribunal's own record shows how long these things can drag even after a ruling. The more useful read is that the street's actual daily rhythm, the fair every fall, the new restaurant in an old bar's shell, the cocktail lounge upstairs from street level, the murals on the lamp posts, was never actually riding on that one file. Those things kept happening every single year the theatre sat closed, and there's no reason in the record to think they'll stop if it stays closed a while longer.

That's worth knowing whether you're heading to Saturday's fair, trying Cucina for the first time, or just walking past the Regent's dark marquee on your way to the subway. The building's fate is still an open question. The street around it already gave its answer.

If you're thinking about what a home in Davisville Village or a neighbouring midtown pocket is actually worth this fall, or you're weighing a move into the area and want a read on what's changing block by block, New Chapter Homes can walk you through it. Start your new chapter. Request a home valuation today.